“To dig gold,” said the boy. “And
you know you can’t prevent me, if it isn’t
on your claim. I know the law.” He
had heard Mr. Peyton discuss it at Stockton, and he
fancied that the men, who were whispering among themselves,
looked kinder than before, and as if they were no longer
“acting” to him. The first speaker
laid his hand on his shoulder, and said, “All
right, come with me, and I’ll show you where
to dig.”

The man looked down upon him, and said gravely, but,
as it struck Clarence, with a new kind of gravity,
“I believe you.”

“Yes,” said Clarence eagerly, as they
walked along together, “I brought luck to a
man in Sacramento the other day.” And he
related with great earnestness his experience in the
gambling saloon. Not content with that—­the
sealed fountains of his childish deep being broken
up by some mysterious sympathy—­he spoke
of his hospitable exploit with the passengers at the
wayside bar, of the finding of his Fortunatus purse
and his deposit at the bank. Whether that characteristic
old-fashioned reticence which had been such an important
factor for good or ill in his future had suddenly
deserted him, or whether some extraordinary prepossession
in his companion had affected him, he did not know;
but by the time the pair had reached the hillside
Flynn was in possession of all the boy’s history.
On one point only was his reserve unshaken. Conscious
although he was of Jim Hooker’s duplicity, he
affected to treat it as a comrade’s joke.

They halted at last in the middle of an apparently
fertile hillside. Clarence shifted his shovel
from his shoulders, unslung his pan, and looked at
Flynn. “Dig anywhere here, where you like,”
said his companion carelessly, “and you’ll
be sure to find the color. Fill your pan with
the dirt, go to that sluice, and let the water run
in on the top of the pan—­workin’
it round so,” he added, illustrating a rotary
motion with the vessel. “Keep doing that
until all the soil is washed out of it, and you have
only the black sand at the bottom. Then work that
the same way until you see the color. Don’t
be afraid of washing the gold out of the pan—­you
couldn’t do it if you tried. There, I’ll
leave you here, and you wait till I come back.”
With another grave nod and something like a smile
in the only visible part of his bearded face—­his
eyes—­he strode rapidly away.